The Kindness of Strangers: The Fiction of Kent Haruf (Essay‪)‬

In 1999, when Kent Haruf burst on the scene, so to speak, with his bestselling novel Plainsong, he was already fifty-six years old. At this point, Haruf had been writing fiction for well over thirty years and had published two previous novels, The Tie That Binds in 1984 and Where You Once Belonged in 1990. Although his early novels earned him a degree of critical recognition, neither was a popular success. Following graduation from Nebraska Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he earned an MFA, most of Haruf's life had been spent working in agriculture, construction, and teaching. Only after the popular success of Plainsong, which was also filmed as a CBS television movie, was Haruf able to devote himself full time to writing. It seems fitting that Haruf, the son of a Methodist minister and one who has spent most of his life on the Great Plains, should achieve his first real success with a novel entitled Plainsong. His writing is, after all, both a "song" of the plains and a stylistic approximation of "plainsong," a variety of monophonic Christian vocal music expressive of the quiet devotion and devout faith of the religious communities in which it is practiced. Haruf's writing is marked by an attitude of stillness and reflection devoted to the enduring relationship of human beings to a particular place, a stable code of ethics, and an unwavering faith in the goodness of life. This faith in what T. S. Eliot called the "permanent things" affords solace and defense against the chaotic force inherent in both nature and human society--a force of disorder that within our nation's symbolism has always been connected with the Western frontier. Even today, the West, populated as one imagines by a raggedy band of misfits, cultists, survivalists, and hardened loners, remains the locus of America's outlaw mythology. Like the "American nomads" of whom Richard Grant writes in a book of the same name, Haruf depicts Westerners who are engaged in a "process of retreat and withdrawal, from the damage within themselves and human relationships in general." (1) Unlike Grant's nomads, however, who include lost conquistadors, mountain men, cowboys, Indians, hoboes, and bullriders, among others, and all of whom seem to prefer their proud, uncompromising solitude to the less-than-ideal accommodation of everyday life, Haruf's rebellious spirits find themselves tamed, even amidst the physical isolation of the great Western plains, by the redemptive force of an enduring civilization. Unlike the many desperado figures in our popular culture (Clint Eastwood, Waylon Jennings, Thelma and Louise, and the rest), Haruf's drifters and rebels crave the protective shelter of those caring, generous souls, themselves often reclusive by nature, who discover their own redemption in acts of charity. Thus, in Haruf's fiction the Western myth is humanized and assuaged, and the simplistic image of the outlaw hero prevalent in our popular culture is displaced by a more realistic image and underlying truth: that the goodness of heartland America, and of America as a whole, is grounded in traditional values and virtues that foster acceptance rather than isolation, serenity rather than violence, belief rather than doubt. As Jonathan Miles wrote (in an otherwise dismissive review), Plainsong is "a life raft for people who felt they were drowning in the sour froth of pop cynicism." (2)